161–170 of 459 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
> You're absolutely right Bot detected
Or something. You're right.
> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was…
What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars", or "every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production"?
The people creating these narratives may a) truly believe it and tried to make it a reality, but failed b) never believed it at all, but failed anyway, c) or be somewhere else on this quadrant of belief vs actuality.
Why not just treat it as, "a prediction that went wrong". I suppose it's because a narrative of promise feels like a promise, and people don't like being lied to.
It's a strange narrative maneuver we keep doing with tech, which is more future-facing than most fields.
> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was…
Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?
Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies. It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way. I do agree with the author about commoditization, however. The most likely outcome is that software will be commodit…
Maybe you could research how to make your own PCBs? It can be done at home with a little equipment and then you can offer it as a service to others.
Did the maker movement end? I dont think so, its just as niche as its always been. We have plenty of maker type posts on here. I dont think “vibe” coding is going away. Especially with so many open source models you can run on a simple Mac.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> BTW, I think a lot of people were/are greatly overestimating the value of coding to business success. Fully agree - We already saw dev prices drop significantly when offshore dev shops spun up. I've had great, and also horrible experiences working with devs that could produce lines of code at a fraction of the price of any senior type dev. The higher paid engineers i've worked with are always worth their salary/hou…
We didn't even have to offshore for lots of bad code to be written. Looks at the scores of Ycombinator startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and failed. Good ideas, pretty websites, but not a lot of substance under the hood. The VC gathering aspect and online kudos was way more important to them than actually producing good code and a reliable product that would stand the test of time. Pretty much the most det…
This can also be restated as, look at all the startups that wrote a shitload of awful code and succeeded.
That’s an indicator code quality doesn’t matter at macro scales. We already knew this though even if we didn’t explicitly say it. It’s more about organization, coordination, and execution than code.
Nah. The most universal rule of human nature is humans be lazy . Makers do extra effort for no real gain. Vibe coders do less effort for more gain. Vibe coding is what everyone wanted computers to be from the beginning. Tell it what to do, it does it. Actually, the future isn't vibe coding, it's vibe agenting . GPT 5.3 is so advanced, you don't need to write a program to do something. You tell the agent what you want…
> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it? Units per hour and dollars per unit was never its strength. It was…
>Companies will be happy to have a way to press down the budget of a cost center, but the delta won’t make or break that many businesses. Software companies spend a huge amount of money on having software written. Why would significantly altering the cost structure not make or break companies?
Vibe coding isn't so much a movement as a big fat tool that was air dropped from space after the megacorps decided to dump billions of dollars into LLMs and LLM companies. It's like comparing Christianity to water wheels or gay pride to to the Saturn V rocket. It's just not really analogous in any way. I do agree with the author about commoditization, however. The most likely outcome is that software will be commodit…